In my early 20s, there was a period when all I owned was about a dozen CDs and a crappy Discman. I’d listen to The Man Who Sold The World album endlessly as I sat on off-peak trains jerking around the Sussex countryside to and from the asylum I worked in.

Generation Bowie, how lucky you are | Letters

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I loved the idea of Bowie as an artist, with his Burroughsian cut-up technique, creating these undecipherable, abstract songs, where we all projected our own meanings onto his jarring word choices and unexpected chord changes.

It occurred to me one day that the song After All, which had sounded like nonsense at first, was about mental illness, and I suppose possibly about his half-brother, who had been a schizophrenic. It was odd to hear something from 1970 dealing with mental illness so compassionately, so beautifully, at a period when the only time it really came up in culture was when a detective in a movie was profiling a serial killer.

I think afterwards I always listened to his songs feeling that there was probably some explicit meaning intended if you could work it out.

And that’s kind of how I enjoyed Bowie, trying to work out what he was getting at. Life on Mars for me became about American movie culture swamping our imaginations, Queen Bitch about a guy living a straight life wishing he had the courage to fuck (or perhaps become) a transvestite prostitute.

Once I went to Oslo on holiday and there was a huge crowd outside the hotel. It turned out that Bowie was playing next door. I bought a ticket after a halfhearted attempt to haggle with the most reasonable tout in the world (“You understand I have to charge a little extra, this is in the nature of buying tickets and selling them on, yes?”). The crowd kept shouting out requests and he settled them with a very gentle and charming: “Don’t worry, we’re going to play all the hits, we’re going to be here for absolutely ages.”

Yesterday, my girlfriend woke me with “David Bowie is dead”. We have a game that started after Nelson Mandela died and I tweeted “Nelson Mandeada”; it’s basically to think of a dead pun involving the recently deceased celebrity. Prone Rivers; Robin Killshimself, that kind of thing.

I really didn’t have the heart, and it’s hard to pun on Bowie anyway, when nobody is ever really quite sure how to pronounce it.

“Are you in mourning?” she laughed as she went to work. “Yeah, I’m in mourning,” I laughed back. I stood, as a 43-year-old man, and cried in the shower.